A stinging movie satire of America’s gun culture is cleaning up at the US box office just as an army of law enforcement officials battles to halt a sniper in the country’s capital in his tracks.
The documentary, ”Bowling for Columbine,” was the 19th most popular movie in US and Canadian cinemas last weekend, as a gunman thought to be using a semi-automatic weapon randomly picked off his 12th victim in Washington.
Socially-conscious independent filmmaker Michael Moore’s film, which was unveiled to critical acclaim at the Cannes film festival in May, took a whopping $728 051 dollars in its second weekend on US screens.
The picture’s receipts soared, raking in an average of $15 827 dollars per screen as it expanded onto 46 screens in North America in its second weekend in cinemas, box office trackers Exhibitor Relations said.
The first weekend, the independent film debuted with more than $209 100 dollars in receipts, a record per-screen performance for a documentary in North America, according to Moore. The unusually impressive documentary run came after Moore last week rallied anti-gun proliferation advocates to flock to their local movie houses to ensure that the film’s message will be heard across the country.
Moore said in a letter to fans on his website that the Hollywood movie distribution system evaluates a new independent film ”a week at a time,” making it crucial that it do well in order to survive its first weekend.
”I hate how the Hollywood movie distribution system works for independent films,” he said. ”But that’s the way it is and I am confident you will help me beat it,” he added, urging anti-gun campaigners into movies theatres.
The picture is being distributed in the United States by the giant Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer network. The darkly sobering film features interviews with former film star and National Rifle Association chief Charlton Heston, rocker Marilyn Manson and with the parent of a pupil slain in a gun massacre at Columbine High School in the western state of Colorado in April 1999.
Moore says uses the school shootings to tackle what he describes as ”a country that is both victim and master of an enormous amount of violence, both at home and around the world.”
”(It’s a) portrait of our nation at the beginning of the 21st century, a nation that seems hell-bent on killing first and asking questions later,” he said. – Sapa-AFP